


Running From Shadows

by bluemermaid



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: Angst, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-03
Updated: 2015-03-03
Packaged: 2018-03-16 05:28:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 530
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3476192
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bluemermaid/pseuds/bluemermaid
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She wasn't home.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Running From Shadows

She wasn't home.

The rooms seemed familiar, and she wandered through them daily, sliding her fingers along the walls and staring blankly out windows. The grass outside was so lush, so green that it had to be real, but it wasn't. None of it was.

She would sit in the old red chair, with the stuffing coming out on the left side, and sip her coffee, looking at all the little trinkets and bits of furniture in the living room. It all seemed so familiar, but not tangible, like a dream from a very long time ago. Sometimes she thought about God, crafting babies, and dumping them in little toy houses until they were ready to be born. Maybe that was why it all seemed so familiar; she'd been there before, before her birth into reality.

She wasn't home, and she missed it, missed every corner and viewpoint of it. She could wander the halls of the familiar new place for weeks and never know it, not really, not as she knew her home. She didn't remember leaving, and she wanted, so desperately, to go back.

Her real home was larger, and filled with decadence, fountains and feathers and gigantic bedrooms with beds large enough for her entire family. She missed her family, too; she couldn't stand the shadows.

He told her, multiple times, always crying, that she _was_ home, and they _were_ her family, but she only stared at him and shook her head, pitying him. If he could see, his real self, it would be so obvious which of them was only shadow. He never smiled anymore; she missed that, too.

She went searching for it, once, late at night when they were sleeping, the shadows. She stepped lightly down darkened streets, barefoot, staring, her eyes wide with the horror of it all, the simplicity. She wasn't home; she didn't recognize anything. The world was so crowded, and yet so simple, filled with nothingness. And everything was gray.

She had nowhere else to go, lost and lonely, and so she crawled back to the fake house, with the fake red chair and the fake coffee that was always so bitter, nothing like the savory sweetness of her reality, of her home. 

He caught her once tearing at the wallpaper, her nails bent and broken from the frantic effort to tear the world apart. She told him she was only looking for pictures, some proof that it was still out there somewhere waiting for her, their home. He just frowned, like he always did, so disgustingly fake, he never frowned at her like that, and pulled her hands away, so gently. His tears, she nearly touched them, just to see if they were as fake as the rest of him.

She wandered, calling to him, to the children, running from shadows as she called to her true purpose, her true reality. But it, too, ran away from her, and she stood on the edge with her arms raised, eyes shut tight as she prayed and prayed for her world to come back to her.

She wasn't home, and she missed it so. But she knew how to find it.


End file.
